Chronicles of the Sword

It's a hard life when you’ve just been promoted to an allsinging, all-dancing knight of the round table. All that doing of good deeds malarkey, when all you really want to do is pillage, get drunk and kill people. Oh well, a man can dream.

The latest offering from Psygnosis enables you to play the part of Sir Gawain, who finds himself entangled in the plans of the evil, but strangely erotic witch, Morgana (anyone who saw Helen Mirren in Excalibur knows what I’m talking about). Morgana’s recently become more than a nuisance to Arthur, so under the guidance of the wizard Merlin, hopefully you can rid Camelot of this scheming bitch.

CHINK

Chronicles of the Sword is essentially a point & click adventure, and having played it for only five minutes my heart sank. The animation of Sir Gawain, and the rest of the characters is an insult to anyone with less than 50% vision, let alone the rest of us. Presented in spectacular jerk-o-vision™, they walk from one end of the screen to the other in what feels like an age. And to add insult to injury there’s no sign whatsoever of a skip screen facility to make the journeys less painful. Hmm…

The scenery is unremarkable, regardless of how historically correct it may be; you’re just too busy cringing at the ragged 3-D rendered characters to notice. The only saving grace is the quality of the in-game animation sequences, the most notable being the Dragon running out of the cave entrance. But obviously this is not enough to change any rationally-thinking person’s mind as to the overall merit of the game.

Progress is made by solving various puzzles and sub-puzzles, fighting and outwitting foes. Don’t hold your breath for anything other than the usual ‘use object A on object B to gain access to area C’ routine, its all been seen before and to be quite honest, done better.

The storyline and musical score are welcome additions to the proceedings and help ease the pain of actually completing the game. But rest assured, PlayStation owners aren’t getting anything extra over the torrid PC game – if anything this is an inferior conversion, and believe me that’s saying something.